[4] The series features homeless teenage mutants in New York City: time-freezing Kiden, shape-shifting Tatiana, body-shifting Bobby, his mysterious brother Lil Bro, the female clone of Wolverine (X-23), and Cameron, a woman with no powers.
[5] The third issue of the series featured the first comic book appearance of X-23, a character created on the X-Men: Evolution cartoon.
The series focuses on former X-Men students and Kamala Khan as they adapt to life in New York City in the post-Krakoan Age when mutants are hated and feared even more due to the actions of Orchis.
After Marvel aborted the project, deeming it not suitable for their audience, Wood used parts of this concept for his series Demo.
[2][3] Quesada told Dana Jennings of The New York Times that "almost everything you see in NYX is based on something I know or have seen firsthand".
Switching to the present, we see Kiden as an emotionally disturbed teenager who gets into an altercation with another student who is a Latin King gangbanger.
[21] A second vision tells them to visit the Hotel Brasil, where they find X-23, who is working as a prostitute, in a compromising position: standing over her john whose suicide she has just witnessed.
X-23's pimp, Zebra Daddy, tracks them down with the help of a banger named Felon, but again Kiden's father appears and warns them.
[26] They escape before the police arrive, but Kiden returns and finds clues to local gang banger D'Sean.
Kiden freezes time while holding Bobby, Lil' Bro, and Tatiana, who are able, then, to join her in the time-freeze.
It turns out that Mrs. Palmer was used as bait to trap the team and exploit their mutant powers, assisted by the ghost of Kiden's dead father.
[30] Joshua Middleton was nominated for the 2004 "Best Cover Artist" Eisner Award for his work on Marvel's NYX, X-Men Unlimited, and New Mutants.
[32] Matthew Peterson, in a 2020 retrospective review of NYX #3 for Major Spoilers, opined that the issue "desperately wants to have the grittiness and reality of 'The Wire', but ended up a poorly conceived Christi MacNicol after-school special, and no amount of Middleton talent could make this script work, culminating in a disappointing and skeeved-out 1.5 out of 5 stars overall".
[33] Peterson commented that "the creative decisions of 2000s Marvel were aimed more at creating controversy and outrage" instead of "storytelling, which is why we see cartoon hero X-23 debuting as an underage prostitute in a skeevy hotel in New York City" where the introduction sequence is "distasteful for a number of reasons, even if you're sex-work-positive, but the most off-putting part of it is how matter-of-fact and dull it is, as though the only point to including the sequence was to create pearl-clutching moments and get people talking".
[36] Schedeen commented that the original volume of NYX "is remembered more for dragging X-23 kicking and screaming into the comics than for its hard-hitting glimpse into the lives of mutant outcasts, even if it did the latter reasonably well" and, given the issues with X-Men line, "the time is ripe for a small series like NYX to return and surprise readers.
[36] Schedeen viewed Liu's greatest "strength" as portraying "the main characters as believable teens without resorting to the Juno treatment" and that "Kalman Adrasofzsky continues to impress, thanks to a style that both hearkens back to Josh Middelton's work while also striking its own tone.
[36] Karen M. Walsh, in the book Geek Heroines (2019), highlighted Liu's inclusion of Cecilia Reyes in the series – "within the Marvel universe, the X-Men often represent the struggles marginalized groups face in society.
[37]: 219 Walsh commented that token characters from marginalized groups often "exist solely as representations of their cultures.